Sadly, it’s been reported via South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency that Neople was not too pleased with the performance of their Soulslike title, The First Berserker: Khazan. As a result, the companies have begun restructuring the game’s development team following underwhelming sales.
Khazan launched globally in March 2025 and at one point reached nearly 30,000 concurrent players on PC. However, that early momentum didn’t hold, and the game ultimately fell short of expectations. In response, a large portion of the roughly 100-person development team has been reassigned internally, with future plans like DLC or additional platform releases now uncertain.
While the sales may not have hit the mark, the reception from players tells a different story. When I first played the demo, I was hooked. It stood out as one of the better Soulslikes in recent memory, especially thanks to its strong combat and more approachable design. When the full game released, we loved it, and so did plenty of fans in the action RPG and Soulslike community. Check out our review of The First Berserker: Khazan to see what we said about the game.
Unfortunately, timing likely played a big role in its struggles. The First Berserker: Khazan launched just days after Assassin’s Creed Shadows, one of the biggest releases of early 2025, alongside other heavy hitters like WWE 2K25 and Split Fiction. Not long after, Elden Ring Nightreign entered the conversation, and at that point, Khazan was largely overshadowed. With the rest of 2025 packed with major releases, it never really had the breathing room it needed to thrive.
Sometimes, it’s not about whether a game is good, it’s about when it shows up. And unfortunately for The First Berserker: Khazan, it showed up at the worst possible time. Ultimately, publishers and investors don’t care about timing or potential, they care about the revenue a game generates. And in this case, it simply wasn’t enough to keep the teams intact. In the end, that’s what really hurts.
